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Mayor-elect Denis Coderre will only be sworn in next week, and he’s already juggling a $100-million budget shortfall.

Interim mayor Laurent Blanchard telegraphed Montreal’s anticipated financial woes during a city council meeting in late September just as the municipal election campaign began, but it garnered little attention.

Now, a member of Coderre’s team says he worries what the new administration will find when it opens the city’s books next week to finish preparing the 2014 $5-billion operating budget for the city and the agglomeration council that runs common services with the 15 island suburbs.

“I was very alarmed in September when I heard interim mayor (Laurent) Blanchard say a $100-million shortfall would have to be solved,” said Saint-Laurent borough mayor Alan DeSousa, who was re-elected on Sunday with Coderre’s Équipe Denis Coderre party.

DeSousa said he raised the issue at council, calling on Blanchard and the city’s finance department to work overtime to plug the hole by the Nov. 3 election.

Under provincial law, municipalities must pass a balanced operating budget. So the city would have to find places to cut costs or increase revenue to plug any current-year shortfall and to ensure the revenue and expense columns add up when presenting the next year’s budget.

Normally, the municipal budget of the next year is drafted and passed by the end of December.

Because the budget takes months to prepare, Blanchard and predecessor Michael Applebaum, who resigned as interim mayor after he was arrested by Quebec’s anti-corruption squad on June 17, bore the work of preparing Montreal’s 2014 budget.

But a financial report shows Blanchard inherited a $30-million shortfall just on the city’s portion of the current-year budget when he became interim mayor in late June.

In August, the city released a mid-year statement of revenue and expenses that showed that as of June 30, the city alone was $30 million short, due in part to a $24.5-million shortfall in projected revenue from fines that had been budgeted for 2013 by the previous administration of former mayor Gérald Tremblay and Applebaum, who served as city executive committee chairperson before Tremblay resigned and he became interim mayor in November.

On a brighter note, as of June 30 the island council’s portion of the budget carried an accumulated surplus of just over $12 million, leaving what the mid-year financial report called a net overall shortfall of $17.6 million.

However, DeSousa cautioned it’s misleading to mix the island council’s surplus and the city’s deficit because a part of the island council surplus belongs to the demerged suburbs.

On Tuesday, the city’s finance department refused, through a spokesperson, to comment on Montreal’s current financial situation.

Meanwhile, Blanchard, who lost his bid to be re-elected as a city councillor on Sunday, hasn’t granted interviews since the election, spokesperson Jonathan Abecassis said.

Westmount Mayor Peter Trent, a representative of the suburban mayors who sit on the island council, said he already anticipated the change in administration would cause the tabling of the 2014 operating budget to be postponed until January.

That would also delay the presentation of the suburbs’ 2014 operating budgets, since they depend on the Montreal budget to find out how much they’ll be billed by the island council for transfer payments in the coming year, Trent said.

Tardy budgets would also delay the issuing of municipal tax bills by two or three weeks.

Still, Trent said he’s not worried yet about Montreal’s next budget, saying: “I’m in limbo right now,” without any information.

Trent is vice-chairperson of the island council’s budget committee, which Montreal hasn’t convened in almost two months. “I’m just waiting by the phone for a phone call,” he said.

He said he’s also cautious about alarmist predictions of large shortfalls before the figures are all in, adding “they’re a scarecrow to scare everybody away and somehow it gets whittled down as time gets on.”

Two factors will tie the Coderre administration’s hands as it takes over the preparation of the 2014 budget, however.

For one, the outgoing Montreal city council, which was run by interim mayors under a coalition of parties and independent councillors for the last year, voted to reject a freeze on the 2014 budgets of the 19 boroughs, which use their budgets to pay for direct municipal services.

For another, Coderre campaigned on a promise not to raise municipal taxes beyond the rate of inflation.

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